


Sharp as Needles

by halotolerant



Category: The Professionals
Genre: Backstory, Disturbing Themes, M/M, Psychological Trauma, Self-Hatred, Violence, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-13
Updated: 2012-10-13
Packaged: 2017-11-16 05:36:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of Tommy McKay, who wasn't supposed to be born and sometimes wished he hadn't been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sharp as Needles

“You weren’t supposed to be born, Thomas McKay,” was what she’d say, sometimes, hands crabbed over her knitting needles, the whole room smelling of the swigs of mint mouthwash to cover the other. 

Tommy, aged five, hiding behind the arm of the sofa, fingers sliding on the lace doily that covered it. 

“I wasn’t married, Thomas McKay,” she told him. “Only married ladies have babies.”

She jabbed the needle towards him like she was still trying to puncture the life out of him and he leapt back, heat pounding, hitting against the wall. The sofa stood awkwardly on the carpet, eating the room. It covered the blood stain – three hours she’d bled, that was what she told him, but he’d clung on and been born anyway, having taken his sweet time, and was healthy, breathing deep and screaming at her. 

She was called Mrs McKay out of courtesy, because her father had been a good man, God rest him, and likely it hastened the end, poor man, having her go about like that. That child killed him, it did. 

The neighbours on the stairs told Tommy that part, as he sat above them pushing a toy car until it ran out of landing and hurtled to a hideous explosion on the next one.  

“His father died in the war,” his Mum said, after they moved, after someone pushed something awful through the letterbox and they moved and there was a new school and wary children – the kids at Tommy’s old school knew what he was and kicked him for it and he’d learnt to keep his fists raised early, so even at the new place where his name meant nothing, they left a wide circle round him.

“His father died in the war, horrible they said, all bleeding and broken.” She told the story with relish, eyes wide, mouth open and tongue darting round the picture, as if she saw the man’s face clearly. 

“I’d like to kill your Dad,” she said at night once, mouthwash strong as she kissed Tommy goodnight. “I’d like to run a knife through his guts and over again – that’s what it’s like, having a kid. You damn near killed me, Tommy.”

“The Nazis killed Dad,” Tommy had pointed out, without a great deal of conviction. 

“Yeah.” She smacked her lips – she’d taken to wearing lipstick, she was about to go out, she had a new man now, Patrick. “They killed him. Nasty. If I ever see him, I’ll tell him that.”

Tommy sometimes dreamed about his mother on a battlefield like the ones he’d seen in the older boys’ comics, in her shortest dress, armed with a knitting needle. 

He felt safe in that dream, he knew she’d protect him. She loved him as fiercely as anything, he felt it with the sure certainty of childhood and the mirrored intensity of his own love for her, which had no other focus.

She didn’t keep boyfriends unless he liked them, but Patrick was great from the first day. He knew about football and took Tommy to the game every Saturday, he kicked about in the back garden, he made Tommy’s Mum smile as she stood in the doorway watching, and laugh even, and she didn’t go back in for a drink even once. 

“So what if the kids at school treat you weird,” he told Tommy. “You’re too clever for ‘em, too grown up for ‘em.”

He knew about soldiers, did Patrick. He knew about weapons. Once, one very special Saturday evening, he called Tommy into the garage and opened the boot of his Ford, and under a black bag there was a rifle as long as Tommy’s arm, all gleaming in the light of the bulb. 

“These are the bullets,” Patrick said, grinning at Tommy’s wonder. “This is how you make the tripod, this is how you hold the stock, see, against your chest, this is how you aim...”

Not every week, just sometimes. 

There was a new baby, and Tommy was eleven, when the men came in the night for the guns and killed everyone. 

All except Tommy. 

He’d rolled under the sofa – no blood stain there now, just him, trying not to breathe, hearing when the baby stopped screaming. 

Patrick was a terrorist, said the policeman. The men were another kind of terrorist, who believed something else. They’d been killing each other for fucking decades why the fuck did they have to come and do it here? Said the policeman. Sorry, I’m sorry about your Mum and your little sister.

Tommy joined the army because actually about the only solid skill he learnt in his whole childhood was how to load, unload and aim most kinds of automatic and semi-automatic guns. 

He was very good at it. “My Dad died fighting the Nazis,” he told the rest of the platoon.  Then, when he was transferred, promoted, he found he’d changed to “My Dad died in a terrorist attack, my whole family did.”

Meanwhile, somewhere, his father was alive. But maybe not, maybe he was about to drop of a massive coronary, maybe a car was about to run him over. 

Life was nothing but a kind of blur, but somehow Tommy hadn’t fallen to the flow, despite all his chances to do so.

He met Bodie during his posting in Northern Ireland, when the man was still sweating bullets over some nightmare about Africa and Tommy wasn’t in the best of ways himself. One glance, another, more slowly, and they were standing together in a deserted field a mile from the base, hands down each other’s pants. You learnt to recognise it, that want, and take it quickly and roughly and grimly. Tommy thought in a rather non-specific way that his failure to be attracted to women was a way he’d been broken. He burnt up with lust like any other man, though. 

Bodie knew his story – the bones of it – because everyone did, because it was a good story and it explained things.

Bodie never got explained. No one ever knew Bodie’s story. 

Just once, after a fire fight that had killed three of their men and left another wounded, Tommy had rolled into a bunker and found Bodie there, alive and felt a wave of surprise and relief and kissed him. Adrenaline. Surprise. They’d both been hard anyway, that was how they both were, that was just a reflex.

He would have preferred to leave Bodie behind after that, but they both got cherry-picked to CI5. No one talked to them much and it took them both a while to get a partner – Tommy was afraid they’d end up together, and eventually bewildered that they hadn’t, they were both spare and both the only spares – and then finally Bodie was signed off with some poor bastard called Raymond Doyle – what the fuck had that man done wrong to deserve Bodie, or either of them? - and Tommy was on his own, apparently for the foreseeable future. 

Remaining. Left over. Spare. He wasn’t supposed to be born anyway, and none of it had any meaning.


End file.
